Hands-Free Database Access from Vivino

There is a cool new app out of Denmark called Vivino, that besides being just plain useful, also offers a great working example of both mobile visual interaction with database content. Vivino lets you use your smartphone camera to take a picture of the label on any wine bottle, and have returned to you complete information about the wine. Yes, it’s a true hands-free database query.

The data can be used strictly for educational purposes, as a way to learn more about a particular wine. At the same time, its point-of-sale implications are huge.

The heart of the technology is image recognition software that can match the photograph of a wine label to Vivino’s standing database of over 450,000 wine label images.  And the database is not just for look-ups: if you like a wine, just flag it in the database with the push of a button, and the system remembers it for you.

Another feature, apparently still under development, is the use of your geo-location to identify nearby wine stores. And of course Vivino has the requisite social sharing features.

What’s also of interest to data publishers is that if Vivino can’t match a wine label, it manually researches it using its own research staff, and sends the information to the user once it makes a match. That has the triple benefit of engagement, enhancing user satisfaction and expanding the database.

Vivino is still in beta, but monetization options are plentiful. It’s worth noting that the wine database space is very crowded, but there doesn’t yet seem to be a dominant player. And if you picture yourself in a wine shop, you can see the innate appeal of being able to snap a picture and get a full profile on any bottle of wine. This is a truly powerful and productive use of mobile technology.

Vivino provides an eye-opening insight to all data publishers: sometimes you can make your existing dataset more valuable just by enhancing the ways users can access it.  This is doubly important in mobile applications, where large fingers and small keys rarely make for a satisfying user experience.

The Strategic Use of APIs

Looking for change, challenge, growth? Increased innovation across your organization? New content models and revenue? A new audience acquisition strategy? The ability to knock out the competition? Then think about giving third party developers to access to your content and data in a structured and open manner via APIs -- Application Programming Interfaces. APIs represent a way for publishers to develop new sources of revenue by increasing content distribution fueled by technology and bringing outside ideas in.

Consider Twitter and the constellation of products created by third party developers in its orbit. Twitter provides users up-to-the-minute content on a continuous basis and generates ad revenue through sales of promoted tweets. Twitter is a relate-able and familiar model to publishers.

By allowing third party developers access to its content, Twitter invited innovation from the outside in, increasing the use and value of its content and boosting its revenue. Third party development using Twitter’s API makes Twitter even more useful and draws a larger user-base to its content. Twitter’s ongoing evolution holds valuable lessons for those producing and distributing content.

Innovation, Increased Data Use, Expanding Audiences - APIs provide external talent the ability to develop novel useful new pathways to your content which increases data use and revenue and helps companies innovate and evolve past its competition. Providing access to content and data in a structured and open manner for third party development provides the opportunity to design entirely new ways for existing customers as well as new customers to experience content.

Successful publishers understand the importance of aligning content to the capabilities new technologies bring. It’s a tough job since publishing as an industry has traditionally under-valued and under-funded R&D and struggles with accepting external ideas. APIs represent the next step in developing new ways of presenting and pricing content as well as meeting the expectations of an audience which is constantly growing in technological sophistication.

Monetizing APIs, Controlling Access to and Pricing Content -APIs offer endless possibilities to monetize content which are limited only by the imagination of app developers. Technology exists for controlling the access to and securing content as well as the tools necessary for monetizing it.

Old-timey revenue and pricing models publishers are already familiar with: ad-supported, transactional and subscription as well as somewhat newer models like DaaS (Data-as-a-Service) can be implemented in conjunction with systems for tracking and billing for data usage.

APIs and Expectations - Across industries and businesses APIs are redefining how companies develop their products and conduct business and the steadily escalating growth of APIs will influence and shape expectations about how content is accessed, used and priced.

-- Nancy Ciliberti